Counting the minutes you worked != value delivery metric
- People work at different speeds
- People work in teams
- Different people produce different synergies between pairs and teams
- Excess focus on individualized delivery buries the metrics of teams
- Automating a process that saves a significant quantity of HR cost per year isn’t measurable by timesheets
- Software you develop in 10 minutes that outsells software you developed in 1000 minutes, is a sauce that can’t be tasted with a timesheet fork
We live in an era of qualified data and value delivery. Timesheets don’t provide this. They mostly only count the time between clock in/out events.
Timesheets advocacy in 2025 comes from spreadsheet people/armchair managers (with power fantasies of conveyor belt manufacturing and fishbowls) who are failing to modernize — making all the little timesheet data entry squirrels pay for their inadequacy. Their TODO of numbers to plot lines gets checked, and everybody else suffers.
You can chase money by Excel all day, or you can chase the value people are willing to pay for. Guess which will keep your company alive longer? Ask your marketing department. Ask your architects. Ask your Customer Success Managers. Ask Customer Support. Ask your software developers. TALK TO PEOPLE + WORK WITH PEOPLE + BUILD WITH PEOPLE. Don’t just send out hourly Slack posts, “did you remember to fill out your timesheet” every Friday afternoon.
Also, please make an entry in your timesheet for how many times you worked on timesheets, talked about timesheets, and chased after timesheet data. Timesheets are now what you are delivering. Your weekly meetings with teammates about what you’re working on, insights, wins, obstacles and losses will now be 70% about if you filled your timesheet, why not, what’s new to the timesheet process, how the timesheet introduction change management wasn’t done and nobody can get to the data we’re entering right now but keep going for the future date where we hopefully will, this timesheet bucket isn’t that useful, what if we had more buckets, what if there were no buckets, but did you fill out your timesheet?